Consumers are increasingly using automated mechanisms to perform every day transactions. Kiosks exist to avoid enterprise personnel and lines. These automated kiosks allow consumers to perform transactions with an enterprise or agency with little to no human intervention.
By and large, the use of barcodes and Quick Response code (QR code and a type of barcode) is becoming commonplace. Barcodes traditionally were used to uniquely label products, now barcodes can also be used to transact for services with enterprises or agencies. The QR code can also be used to acquire additional information about something of interest and can even be linked to profiles or products and/or individuals. In fact, there are many uses today for barcodes and QR codes; also, in order to provide security many barcodes are often digitally signed and/or encrypted.
Yet, still another technology is emerging in the industry to automate transactions of consumers. This technology is referred to as Near Field Communications (NFC). NFC is a set of short-range wireless technologies, which are beginning to be embedded in portable devices of consumers, such as cellular phones. NFC can be used for access control, information collection and exchange, loyalty transactions, coupon gathering, payment processing, and the like. NFC can also be used to power passive target objects, such as tags on billboards, displays, and/or products for purposes of transacting with the target objects. Moreover, NFC can be used with peer-to-peer transacting when two devices are equipped to communicate using NFC.
Many organizations are already investing in the provision of barcodes to mobile devices to allow consumers to use the barcode in place of the printer paper based equivalent; as an example, many airlines send a 2D (two-dimensional) barcode to a customer's mobile phone. This allows the consumer to get through security and board the flight. Adoption has been limited thus far and many airports have yet to invest in the bar code scanning at the security checkpoint, although this is on the increase. This highlights the impact on technology adoption (and hence associated cost reductions, ease of use, etc.) when more than one system is running in parallel. This problem will be further compounded as many enterprises move to NFC technologies—consumers using the NFC capability in their mobile device to pass security and board their flight when there may be three systems in place. Additionally as part of the traveler's journey they may need to use paper, barcode or NFC to access other services—airline lounges, kiosks to change seats, gate desk for standby upgrades, etc. These may all stem from the same purchase, for example a business-class return ticket where one sheet of paper was all that was required.
So, the problem is at different locations and at different times an enterprise may only be able to support barcode processing whereas the consumer's mobile phone is equipped with NFC capabilities. In another scenario, an enterprise is equipped to handle NFC capabilities but the consumer's mobile phone has a barcode for a given transaction.